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Moogs
Hates the Infotainment
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: NSA Archives
 
2004-06-18, 08:49

I was definitely an astronomy kid from the time I was in middle school, through high school. I've always been interested in this kind of thing. Probably I would have majored in Astronomy or Astro-physics if I was more mathematically inclined. Once you reach college, astronomy goes from neat pictures and their stories, to heavy-duty equations and number-crunching. Then if you're a God at that, you could try your hand at getting an advanced degree in some particular branch like Cosmology, but I imagine most people wash out of those programs.

All these guys we see on the Science channel (Tuesday nights are a very good source of Astronomy info) are pretty much God's in their chosen field I think. Astronomy and Cosmology are two of those odd profressions where, if you're not among the very best minds in the world, you don't get a job and end up teaching Atronomy 101 at the local university or Physics at the local high school. Very difficult profession to break into, probably because there's not a lot of funding to go around, so what does go around lands with the very cream of the crop, so to speak.

Some good books for you:

The Invisible Universe - by David Malin
(Most a photo book, but it's a really well-crafted collection of large format photos... you will be awe-struck).

Hubble Vision - by Peterson & Grant

Hubble Revisited - by Fischer & Duerbeck

Orbit - National Geographic
(Views of earth from space, with some good science tidbits for each).

The Illustrated Edition of A Brief History of Time - by Stephen Hawking
(Good visual primer for the basic tenets of cosmology and astro-physics)

Pale Blue Dot - by Carl Sagan
(Good primer on space exploration and other areas)


...and finally, a good link to get you to the real meaty stuff, if you're so inclined.


http://publishing.cambridge.org/stm/astronomy/

...into the light of a dark black night.
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